High School Suspends Student Hackers Who Changed Grades

from the surprised-this-doesn't-happen-more-often dept

I'm actually surprised that we don't see many more stories like this one. A group of students have been suspended for hacking into their school's computer system and changing their grades. It sounds as though many school districts aren't that careful in securing their networks, so you would expect this sort of story to be popping up all the time. I'm wondering it's happening and schools aren't figuring it out - or if they're just keeping it quiet when they discover it happening.
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  • identicon
    alterenatives(), 10 Mar 2003 @ 7:13am

    If the systems were like my old High school....

    then 'hacking grades' would be quite hard.

    Grade entry is only able to be done during a certain window. Once a record is written, the only way to change it was to be at the system console(s).

    So, the only way to 'spoof' the system was to insert something inbetween the enrty computer and the main computer.

    Paper records still exist and can be checked. I know they were in my case...and when I was asked about what I knew about the board of Ed computers, I told them the above, the 8 different passwords I knew (gems like pencil) the normally scheduled down times. I was told to stop being so nosy.

    Oh the joys of dumpster diving and getting the output of the teletype machine!

    link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    Luke, 19 May 2003 @ 3:15pm

    Schools try to keep it as quiet as possible...

    That exact same situation just happened in my town a couple of weeks ago. Three Stoughton, WI high school students have been expelled and criminal charges are still being processed after they used a program from the internet to hack in and change their grades. The school tried to keep it very hush hush, but a parent of an uninvolved student called the local news, and they jumped on it. Here is a list of all the news coverage of this event.

    link to this | view in chronology ]


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